Monthly Archive for July, 2005Page 3 of 6

Earthworm Jim and Christian Art

Published
by
michael lee
on 22 July 2005
in miscellany
. 0 Comments

I get a lot of comments on my work, but perhaps the biggest surprise from my readership is that I’m a Christian…and I’m good at entertainment. By the way, not only are the ’secular’ surprised of my religion but so are fellow Christians. Most common quote: “The guy who made Earthworm Jim is a Christian?!”

Article Link

This an interesting read. He drifts onto some tangents, and his tone is a bit harsh, but overall, I think his thesis is credible. People (Christians) who don’t enjoy art for its own sake won’t produce art. People reject art that is created for the sake of preaching a message; but people will engage message for the sake of art, if it’s authentic.

1993

Published
by
aly hawkins
on 20 July 2005
in writing workshop
. 19 Comments

Sometimes on Saturdays, we sunbathed in the yard next to the dorm. Well, the girls who could tan sunbathed, and I slathered myself with 45 and sat outside to belong. Lora had the most amazing skin: she was California-blonde and blue-eyed, but her skin turned a rich shade of gold after two minutes of UV…I was jealous, but I loved her so much, I let it go.

All the rooms in the two-story dorm opened into a gigantic atrium kind of thing—it didn’t have a skylight, so I’m hesitant to call it an atrium—and occasionally when we were feeling crazy, someone would turn up their Petra or DC Talk to Danger and we’d dance like maniacal druids on the walkway that circled the second floor, ignoring any chance of permanent damage to our hearing. As if any of us knew how to dance. We were Christians, duh, so dancing was a sin that had been purged from us long ago. But we wanted to own it again, you see, like girls who have been robbed of an innocence, trying to recover by exhausting that part of us that resisted.

In a spring rugby game against St. Mary’s, my brother got a concussion. He came off the field with crossed eyes, spouting important facts like “Brown cows taste best,” and I walked him down the hill to the hospital for X-rays, crying the whole way. (He recovered in record time, and was pissed that the coach wouldn’t let him play the rest of the game.) I can’t recall ever being more frightened, fearing I would lose my only sibling, scared he would babble about choice cattle for the rest of his life. He still loves a good steak.

We had a band. Witness, it was called, if you can stand it. We firmly believed we were the sh*t, and perhaps we were in that time and place. Cerissa was a far better singer than I, but I would not admit it even to myself; identity must be preserved at all costs. We practiced 2nd Chapter of Acts and Boyz 2 Men songs as if our lives depended on it, not contemplating for a second that our missionary-boarding-school renditions might be anything short of perfection…which was, of course, great training for years of musical missteps to come. Can you believe I thought I was a soprano?

On choir tour before graduation, we sang at an orphanage. The concert lasted all of 22 minutes, but we stayed for hours, holding close those children who would not let us go. One tiny boy with a misshapen face and no legs latched onto me, refusing to relinquish the touch he had craved in all his short memory, even when it was time to change his diaper. He peed on me. The Kikuyu nurse laughed, murmuring “baraka” as she pried his fingers away to change him. Blessing.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Technical Ministry

Published
by
michael lee
on 19 July 2005
in technology
. 4 Comments

1) Don’t look Up. The sound board is where the action is at, so please, keep your eyes firmly planted on the faders and VU meters. They will tell you everything you need to know about the service flow.

2) Don’t rehearse. Rehearsal is for the band and singers to work out all their mistakes. There’s a good chance that they’re going to change what they’re doing by Sunday morning anyway, so spending valuable mid-week time rehearsing lyric cues and mixing cues is just a waste. Better to let the thing fly together last minute.

3) See a knob, Turn a knob! Look, the service lasts a really long time. You’ve got to fight boredom somehow. One great way to do that is to start tweaking knobs. Pick a knob that you’ve never really paid attention to before (AUX 7, for example), and just start spinning the thing. What could possibly go wrong?

4) Mock the ignorance of others. You’ve spent years reading every issue of Mix, Sound on Sound, Audio Visual, and Tape Op. You’ve been to the trade shows, tweaked with the gear, assembled the system, labeled every cable and built every computer. You know more about how this system works than anyone else could possibly know. Good news! This gives you the right to mock people who know less than you! Knowledge is power, and baby, you got the juice! Is the worship leader saying that his monitor sounds muddy, when what he clearly means is that he wants a 3 db bump at 4.8k on his vocals? Mock away! Did the pastor suggest adding some additional lighting to the stage so that the drama is more effective? Don’t just educate him on the limitations of the current sanctuary wiring, suggest that you find it hilarious that he didn’t already know!

5) Don’t anticipate. A worship service is a fluid environment. If someone picks up a microphone, don’t assume that they’re going to use it; wait until those first few words are out until you take it off mute. Does the band sound like it’s ramping up to go back into another chorus at the end? Better let them actually get there before you throw those words on the screen. Better to be lagging behind on every single stanza than wrong once!

6) Refuse to acknowledge the existence of less expensive alternatives. Sure, we could pull off that drama this weekend with the use of two well-placed PZMs and a lapel mic, which we already own, but wouldn’t it be so much cooler to buy 12 brand new headworn wire mics, a rack’s worth of expander/gates, a new board with assignable mute groups, and a diversity array receiver? When the elder suggests that this solution might be a bit outside of the church’s budget, take personal offense.

7) Be con-active. Anyone can be pro-active. Being con-active takes discipline, determination, and true character. “Wow, that buzz is pretty bad!” Yup. “Any idea what might be causing that?” Nope. “Maybe we could isolate each channel to see if it’s coming from a pickup, or maybe a bad cable?” It’s probably the lighting. “So your suggestion would be to ignore it and assume someone else will take care of it?” Yup.

Dedicated to all of the hard-working and talented tech people I’ve worked with, who embody the positive antitheses of these sins. Chief among these are Lee and Randy Castner.

Potterighteous.

Published
by
aly hawkins
on 19 July 2005
in art and culture and faith and theology
. 8 Comments

Intelligent, wonderful review of HP6 here. Didn’t know you were soaking in Christian history and metaphor, didja?

PBS on ECM, pt 2

Published
by
michael lee
on 18 July 2005
in emerging church
. 5 Comments

The second half of PBS’s series on the Emerging Church Movement is online:

PBS on ECM

Just a few thoughts. Even if Brian McLaren doesn’t want the burden of being the EC spokesman, he’s landed the gig. The whole segment is focused on him and his writings.

There are two straw-man arguments that I’ve heard B Mac launch a few times now, that I think are worth addressing. The first is this: he is arguing against a definition of certainty that nobody is defending, at least not people with substantive voices in the evangelical movement. He wants to say that spiritual knowledge is not the sort of thing we can have “2+2=4″ kind of certainty about. I thoroughly agree. Nobody of consequence has defended that position since Kant blew Descartes out of his foundationalism pond. What Evangelicals means by certainty and what McLaren means by confidence are substantively identical. I have great confidence in Jesus as the Son of God, but this side of death I can’t have Cartesian certainty. That is a very emergent statement; that is also a very Evangelical statement.

The second straw-man is this; the accusation that Evangelicals pick and choose verses, taking them in small snippets to construct a theology betrays an ignorance of the scope and subtlety of historical-textual hermeneutics. There are those who pick up a book like Leviticus and try to read it as propositional moral decree. Those people are called fundamentalists, and we are right to question their interpretation. Evangelicals and Fundamentalist are not the same thing. The majority view of Evangelical hermeneutics gives priority to the principles of text-as-text, historical and cultural context, narrative progression, and genre conventions. Were McLaren to spend a few hours discussing Acts with Clint Arnold or Ben Witherington, he would find much more in common with their interpretive schema than he would find in opposition.

Are there substantive differences between how EC and EV folk think about scripture and knowledge? Of course, but it’s not found on these two points.